TUESDAY 17 AUGUST 2021

In this newsletter you'll find details about a new paper on newsroom diversity from one of our Journalist Fellows. You'll also find a chart and an episode on this year's Digital News Report and a selection of books and academic articles on journalism curated by our academic researchers and our staff.  

🕒 This newsletter is 1,344 words, a 10-minute read. If you don't receive it yet, join our mailing list here. If you want to receive our daily roundup with readings on journalism, join our Telegram channel here.
 

Explore Digital News Report 2021 here | Check out data from your country | Downdload a PDF version | Read our methodology

The issue. Diversity has been at the centre of many conversations in newsrooms in the last couple of years. However, a survey of news executives conducted in 2020 suggests there's plenty of room for improvement. While many of our respondents felt their organisation was doing a good job on diversity at junior levels (84%), only 37% felt the same was the case at the senior leadership level. 

The paper. A new paper from our Journalist Fellow Zoe Ramushu aims to find what's keeping newsrooms from being truly inclusive environments.  Instead of explaining why it makes good economic and cultural sense to ensure a newsroom represents the audience it serves, she imagines what she calls the ‘Chiriseri Test’ after her maiden name. Her goal is to ask key thought-provoking questions about diversity. 

A quote. "Many people see diversity as a Black and white question - but diversity also has to do with caste in India, rural versus urban communities in Nicaragua, and Russian language versus Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan. You know whose voices have been systematically silenced. These are the voices you need in your newsroom," Zoe writes in this piece. 

🔗 Read Zoe's piece here
📃 Download her paper here

With press freedom under threat... we are doing all we can to help journalists fight back. Our new fund brings journalists working in difficult environments on to our signature Fellowship Programme so they can build the networks, skills and knowledge they need. Please donate any amount you can from £25 to the fund so more journalists under pressure can spend time with us.

⚽️ Around 317,000 people watched Spanish influencer Ibai Llanos' interview with Lionel Messi on Twitch. | 💰 US magazine The Atlantic has reported a total circulation of 833,410, almost twice the figure reported in 2019. | 📱 Chartbeat reader data shows 35% of desktop users leave a page before scrolling down at all | 📬 The New York Times announced that one-third of its 57 newsletters will become subscriber-only. 15 million people read them right now. | 💸 One of those newsletters will be written by academic Tressie McMillan Cottom, who's donating $25,000 she got from her Substack founding members to a learning institution. |  📉 Media start-ups have attracted around $115m in funding in 2021, according to new data from Pitchbook, ten times less than they did in 2015. | 👯‍♀️ David Mikkelson, the co-founder of fact-checking site Snopes, has been suspended for plagiarising 54 articles, some under a false byline. 

A significant age gap. Across all countries, just 25% prefer to start their news journeys with a website or app – down three points compared with last year and seven points compared with 2018. Under-35s have a weaker connection with websites/apps (18%) and are much more likely to prefer to access news via social media (34%). | Learn more here

Explore Digital News Report 2021

🔗 Read the executive summary of the report. | By Nic Newman
✊🏿 How people perceive news coverage. | By Richard Fletcher 
⚖️ What audiences think about impartiality. | By Craig T. Robertson
🏡 How technology has disrupted local news. | By Anne Schulz
💰 Financing commercial news media. | By R. Fletcher and R. Nielsen
🕺🏻 How and why people use social media for news. | By Simge Andı 

📈 Explore data from your country. Figures from 46 markets
🌎 Read the report in Spanish. Explore the report in this global language
📄 Download the PDF version and read it on your tablet 
📊 Check out our interactive. Explore our data and build your own charts
👩‍🔬 Learn about our methodology. How we produce the report

🎙 Listen to our podcast series on the report 
🎥 Watch a video summary. Explore the key findings in 2 minutes
👩🏾‍💻 Explore the report in 192 slides. A presentation to use in your class

"Trust is up six points and I think there are different factors at play in different countries. But to some extent this is really a recognition that the news media has played a critical and valuable role in informing people [over the pandemic]"

Nic Newman
Lead author of the report
Audio and transcript here

JOURNALISM IN AFGHANISTAN 

🇦🇫 A young Afghan reporter describes her fear as the Taliban rise back to power. Her story in Spanish here. 🤫 “When they want to silence the press, they choose women journalists,” says Kiran Nazish, from the Coalition For Women In Journalism, in a piece we published in May. 📺 After the fall of Kabul, most TV channels have taken women anchors off screen. Defiantly, independent channel TOLO News has not. 👩🏾‍💻 A collective of female journalists is battling to make women's voices heard at this moment. They've managed to raise more than $175,000 to keep the project alive. 💰 The International Federation of Journalists has launched a special fund to help Afghan journalists and is urging those who can to make a donation here.

Why we created it. As part of our Journalist Fellowship Programme, we've created a selection of readings for journalists interested in grappling with what academic work can tell us about journalism, its place in society, its implications, the institutions that sustain it, and its future. Because of the structural inequalities in academic research, the majority of the readings are from high income democracies.

How we organised it. The document is organised into 22 topics, with a suggested starting reading for each marked in bold, followed by a sample of additional readings. The list has been curated by Meera Selva, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Joy Jenkins, J. Scott Brennen, and Anne Schulz. We update it periodically with suggestions from our community of journalists and researchers around the world. 

ONLINE EVENTS AND COURSES

🔍 6 Sept - 10 Oct. Learn how to use platforms to develop your investigative reporting in this five-week course run by Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko. See how to gather and process information from social accounts, images, ads and messaging apps. | Knight Center

🌍 13-17 September. Journalists and media innovators from across Africa can sign up for the inaugural Jamfest, a showcase for new content styles, audience engagement methods and approaches to sustainability. | Jamlab

WE ARE READING...

🤖 AI for news. A new report by the Tow Center features 9 news outlets using automated journalism to cover COVID-19. It shows the importance of computational thinking, which gives journalists an edge in deploying automated news quickly and efficiently. | Tow Center

🏡 A new local venture. This piece by Ian Burrell profiles The Mill, a new local media venture created in Manchester over the pandemic. It has attracted 13,500 free subscribers to its weekly newsletter and 925 members who pay £7 a month. Its value proposition? One long read every day and no advertising. | i newspaper

🛠 A useful resource. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma has launched a concise style guide with useful tips on news choices, language usage and ethics in reporting on the impact of trauma. | Dart Center

🦠 An unhelpful metaphor? The widely adopted 'infodemic' term, used to describe an overabundance of COVID-related information, is misleading and "oversimplifies a complex situation," argue Felix Simon and Chico Camargo in a recent journal article. | New Media & Society

More information on what we do...

Today's email was written by Eduardo Suárez and Matthew Leake.